Wednesday, January 25, 2006

I almost said this in class, but its annoying when people start telling cute stories from their childhood.But! I have a blog, it’s already automatically self-indulgent.So, in response to Dr. Rein’s question do we agree that it is necessary but dangerous to compare our religion to that of others, I have this.

I can remember riding the bus home from first grade. Me neighbor, Jason, and I were sitting together playing some half assed version of eye spy. Thanks to careful planning on the administrations part it always took us over an hour to get home from our school which was all of 10 minutes away.We were always doing boring things.Jason used to sometimes draw mazes during lunch and then give them to me to do on the ride home while he watched.They almost never actually had a path through, everything would dead end.I’m still not sure if he did it on purpose or not.I thought he was a pretty weird kid.

Anyway, that day he invited me to go to a ice cream Sunday thingy with his youth group. I was surprised he went to church since I’d never seen him at mine. It turned out he, instead of being catholic, like I then assumed all Christians were, was a Baptist.What’s more he knew what it meant to be Baptist, and when I asked him what the difference between what I was and what he was, he knew. He started telling me all Catholics had got wrong.

This story is getting boring even for me, so I’ll just sum it up.I ended up calling him an idiot bighead or something, and he told his mom on me and we were mad each other the whole next day.

I know this is kind of a silly example, and hopefully adults are more mature when they explore things about other religions. But the same type of danger is there, its easy to get offended when talking about beliefs only one of you have. And its necessary, an understanding of being Catholic is incomplete if one doesn’t know what makes it different.

This seems really unnecessary now that I’ve typed it out. Sorry if your reading this.